The Way of the Ground
by EnoughToTemptMe
Summary: It takes weeks, nearly months, before he can think about it. Their people are still healing, minds and bodies and souls. But the day Raven can walk without pain through Camp Jaha, and the day Wick lets her walk without hovering by her side, is the day Bellamy starts thinking about leaving. Following. Finding her. (Spoilers for Blood Must Have Blood, Part Two.)
1. Part One

It takes weeks, nearly months. The kids are ruined by their time in Mount Weather, by watching their friends tortured and harvested and murdered before their eyes. Jasper especially has a terrible anger burning in his eyes, and it hurts Bellamy to see the way not even Monty can make it fade.

He's not waiting for their nightmares to stop. He knows from experience that they don't. That they never will. But their people will get to a point where they can either manage to live with the nightmares, or they will drown beneath the weight of them.

She told him to take care of them, and that's what he's going to do.

Until they can take care of themselves.

Slowly, slowly, Harper stops reaching for a weapon at every stray sound. Slowly, Monty starts sleeping again, long enough that the circles beneath his eyes mostly fade away. Miller stops looking at his father as if he's waiting for condemnation, and Monroe stops waking up the rest of the camps with her cries in the middle of the night, stops apologizing for saying "it's over." Jasper looks less less angry and more broken, and Bellamy hates that he considers that an improvement, but that's the way of the ground.

It takes weeks, nearly months, before he can think about it. Their people are still healing, minds and bodies and souls.

But the day Raven can walk without pain through Camp Jaha, and the day Wick lets her walk without hovering by her side, is the day Bellamy starts thinking about leaving.

Following.

Finding her.

It takes him three days to decide, a mere hour to pack, but that's time enough for his sister to find him.

Octavia takes in the pack he's stuffing with extra rations, canteens, ammo. Her face is clean, no longer smeared with warpaint, but her eyes hold a familiar darkness that he imagines makes the two of them look even more alike than they used to.

"You're going after her," she says eventually. He spares her a glance as he checks the laces of his boots, shrugs into his coat. It's truly winter now; he needs it more than ever, and he can only hope that wherever Clarke is, she's found a way to keep warm.

"After all she's done?" Octavia says.

"What has she done," Bellamy replies, "that makes the blood on her hands any worse than the blood on mine?"

Section 17 on the Ark. TonDC. A shared pull of the lever. They are both baptized in the blood of the innocent and the blood of the damned. The new way of life they have been born into is a terrible one, but he intends to make sure Clarke knows it's still a life worth living.

Octavia's lips quirk up in the smallest smile. "Alright, then. Give me twenty."

He stops to see Dr. Griffin and Kane, saying nothing but a request for an extra coat, but the plea in Clarke's mother's eyes tells him she knows what he really means.

The coat she gives him is her own, a warm, downy one that Kane had made for her, but the older man watches in knowing silence as the doctor offers it up.

"I can get a new one easily enough," Abby Griffin says. "Take it where it's needed."

Bellamy nods, and leaves.

Octavia, Lincoln, and Raven are waiting by the gate when he arrives.

"You're not coming," he tells Raven as soon as he sees her. She has a brace again, and she walks as freely as she ever has with her damaged leg, but he doesn't know where they're going and if there is one person other than her mother that Clarke would be most devastated to see hurt, Bellamy is sure it's Raven.

"I'm not," Raven agrees, and Bellamy's shocked into silence long enough for her to keep talking. "But once you find her, you either bring her back or take us to her."

In Raven's eyes Bellamy sees no less of the devastation and the fury that he saw when Clarke came back into camp with Finn's blood on her hands, but he also sees mercy and sorrow and determination.

So he nods. "Tell the others. The ones who would want to know."

Raven lifts her chin in agreement, then turns to walk back to engineering, where Wick is waiting for her.

"Both of you?" Bellamy says, turning to his sister and Lincoln. "You could just stay here. And it's dangerous for you," he adds, nodding at the other man. "You said your people will see you as a traitor now."

"You're not going anywhere without me," Octavia says.

Bellamy watches Lincoln's eyes shift to his little sister, the warrior, and knows that Lincoln isn't going anywhere without Octavia.

He's a little surprised when Lincoln also speaks. "Clarke is my people," he tells Bellamy, and Bellamy wonders what he must have missed for Lincoln to be looking at him like that.

"Bell," Octavia says softly, suddenly, and he looks away from Lincoln to follow her gaze.

Behind them, watching them stand at the gate to the rest of the ground, are all of their people. Those they brought back from Mount Weather, their families who cried to see them again, the ones who landed with the Ark, those who saw them come back from battle.

Kane steps forward, hands Bellamy an extra pack. It's filled with a radio, more rations and camping supplies than he had felt right taking by himself, and––Bellamy looks up sharply at the crowd of watchers to search out Jasper's solemn eyes––safety goggles.

"May we meet again," Kane says quietly, the others standing in silent support behind him.

Bellamy nods. "May we meet again."

And the three of them walk away from the camp, all too aware of the eyes watching them, trying to draw them safely back through the gates.

* * *

They find her on the shortest day of the year.

It's the coldest day yet of the year, too, and a down coat has never felt as heavy as it does when it sits, unused, in Bellamy's pack.

When they first left Camp Jaha, they had walked in the direction he had watched Clarke take until she disappeared into the trees. But once out of the open, it all had felt wrong––so he thought of Mount Weather's position, and then of TonDC's, and then of the camp behind them, and then he turned and walked the way that would take him the furthest from all of them.

Bellamy doesn't think there is anyone who knows him as well as Clarke does, and when he sees the tiny little lean-to, forlorn in a clearing kilometers and kilometers away from where she left him, he finally believes that maybe nobody in the world knows Clarke as well as he.

The hastily constructed little building is barely big enough to hold a fire pit, a bed roll, and a pack––it's a cell of her own making. The pack, at least, contains recently-cooked meat and a few root vegetables, so he knows she's not starving herself to death. Clarke isn't there, though, and the thought of her so close charges his body with electricity while he stares out at the rapidly darkening woods.

"She didn't bother with much," Octavia notes, ducking back out of the shelter, and he frowns at the slight sneer in her tone

"What did you expect to find?" Bellamy asks his sister. She grew up beneath the floor, and he has always known that because she could not _see_ much of the world, she learned to feel too much for what she could. But he has long forgiven Clarke her sins, and it's become clear to him that Lincoln has forgiven her the destruction of his own village.

He doesn't know why Octavia judges herself better suited than either of them to condemn Clarke for the destruction of TonDC.

So he says as much.

And Octavia _laughs _at him. It's not a happy laugh, or an amused laugh; it's bitter, and a little sad, but it's still a laugh, and Bellamy can't help but stare.

"What makes you think that's the sin I'm judging her for?" she asks him.

She was the first one to pull the truth out of him, Octavia reminds him; she was the first one he told how Clarke walked away. From the camp, from their people, from him.

Bellamy stares at his sister. "Octavia––"

"Bellamy?"

And Clarke's there, on the edge of the clearing, a dead hare hanging from her hands. Her face is thinner than it's ever been, which he hates, but the expression in her eyes is surprised instead of shattered like it was the last time he saw her. That, he doesn't hate at all.

"Lincoln? Octavia?" Clarke asks, the bewilderment in her tone growing as she spots each of them. Her gaze then goes straight back to Bellamy. "What are you...what are you all doing here?"

"Clarke." Her name is all he can say. All other words have escaped him, and he can't figure out how to tell her that he came to find her, to be with her, to make sure she has a warm coat, to make sure she's not doing this alone.

"We came to bring you home."

Their eyes all slip to Octavia, each of them except Lincoln shocked by her words.

But Bellamy hasn't seen Clarke's face for so long, and his eyes slide back to Clarke's, all the while wondering if he looks like he feels, like a drowning man seconds away from clawing his way back to the surface.

"Octavia," Clarke breathes. It is a question and an apology and a plea. Her face is mostly pale, but she has spots of bright color on her cheekbones. "I don't…I don't know that I–"

Octavia's already shaking her head.

"We don't mean we want to bring you to Camp Jaha," she says, and her voice is perhaps the most gentle Bellamy's heard in a long time. "And it doesn't have to be right now."

Does Clarke know what home really means, what it means to any of them? Home is not a place, here on the ground, because _thousands _of books could be filled with everything he doesn't about earth––but he knows everything about _home, _because it wears her face, and speaks in her voice, and walks away in her body.

"Take the time you need, Clarke," Lincoln says quietly. "Just don't let yourself be one more ghost your people lost to the war."

Clarke looks away, disappears into her lean-to set down her catch. When she reappears in the doorway, he's waiting with her mother's coat, and he drapes it around her shoulders when she's brought up short by his body in her way.

"Bellamy?" She grasps the edges of the coat reflexively, and then pulls it closer around her as the warmth registers.

"Clarke," he says hoarsely, and it's all he can do to keep himself from dragging her toward him, into him, never letting her go when she looks up at him with those wide eyes. "We did terrible things. But we did them to survive, to make sure our people survive, to get them home. It's the way of the ground."

Clarke looks at him for a long moment, glances back at where Lincoln and Octavia are watching them.

"It's too cold to travel tonight," she says eventually, and the expression on her face isn't a smile but it's a far cry from the devastation he saw on it when she left weeks and weeks ago. And then she holds out her hand to him. "Please come inside."

And she takes him by the hand and leads them both home.


	2. Part Two

Please note the rating change. Written for Day Two of OneYearOfThe100 Week: Favorite Male Character's POV

* * *

He thought he'd been angry before. When he had forced himself to put one foot in front of the other, toward Camp Jaha, away from her. When he drank twice his share of moonshine because she wasn't there to drink her own. When he walked through camp every day, and their people all looked to him, because he was the only one left.

Bellamy didn't expect to be angry when he finally found Clarke. He thought he had finished with that, that he had quietly spent all his anger on missing her and once he found her, even that anger would stop.

He was wrong.

He realizes that now, after a couple days spent in the tiny lean-to with her. The four of them had suffered through sharing the tiny space the first night––Bellamy's still not sure how they all fit, but it had been cramped to say the least.

The next day Lincoln and Octavia started to build their own shelter. In a mere couple of days, it is sturdier and warmer looking than what Clarke has been living in for weeks, which just goes to show how pitiful her attempt at shelter had been.

That's when some of the anger starts trickling back into his gut.

And it stays there, hot and steady and weighing him down like the rocks he takes from the fire to put under Clarke's bedroll because she won't do it herself. It's the dead of winter and she won't keep herself warm, so Bellamy grinds his teeth and does it for her.

It stays there when Octavia and Lincoln announce their intentions to head back toward Camp Jaha with news of Clarke––they're too far away for the radio's range, and their people are all waiting for word, for directions. It stays there when Octavia cuts off Clarke's protests with a single motion, and when Lincoln's gaze shames Clarke into staring down at her hands.

It stays there when the two leave camp early in the morning, and throughout the day while he pries from Clarke small details about her time alone, and until dark when she goes into the lean-to, despite the fact that the newer, better shelter stands empty for the night.

Bellamy knows her, and he'd already laid the warm stones in the crappy little hut's bed, as much as he wishes she would have proved him wrong and taken the warmer place for the night.

He breathes in the frigid night air for a few more moments, trying to drink in the cold to cool the heated anger churning in him, and he thinks maybe he's succeeded as he turns and follows Clarke into the lean-to.

Clarke's taken off the coat and her shirt, and if things were normal between them, if the war had never happened and they'd never done the things they did, maybe he would have stuttered and averted his eyes, or made some kind of joke about behavior unbefitting a princess, but that's not who they are now. Now, he looks at Clarke and sees the ridge of her spine, the obvious lines of her ribs, the way her pants are barely hanging onto her hips. Every night until now, when he enters she's usually already wrapped in a hodgepodge of furs from the animals she's been surviving on. He's never seen this much of her body.

"What the fuck, Clarke?" he says, and dimly he knows his voice is too loud, louder than it's been in a long time, and Clarke jumps at the sound of his voice, snatches her mother's coat up from the floor, holds it in front of her.

"Hey!"

"I took care of them. I kept up my end of the bargain," he says fiercely.

"What the hell are you talking about? What bargain?" Clarke asks, and she's frowning as if she doesn't _know_, as if she doesn't _get _why he's so _angry _with her.

"_May we meet again,_" he hisses at her, and she stumbles back from him as if he's struck her.

"Bellamy?" she whispers, and he ignores the way she clutches the coat even tighter to her bare torso, because the fire and the stone and the fierce, fierce anger that have been pulling him into the ground for days now are finally rising up.

He thinks that maybe this is the same kind of power that leveled cities and turned people to ash or to statues or to memories.

"How were we supposed to meet again if you let yourself die, Clarke?"

But if he is Vesuvius, Clarke is not his Pompeii.

"Screw you," she snarls. "This is not me letting myself die, Bellamy." She tosses the coat down again and stretches the skin of her stomach with her fingers. "_This _isn't letting myself die," she continues, voice darker than ash clouds, darker than _I am become death_. He stares at the jagged pink mark of healed flesh that she frames between her hands, the kind of wound that would only have healed with stitches, and some stupid part of him wonders where she got the supplies, and how much pain she must have been in as she sewed herself up.

"This is _surviving, _Bellamy," she says, and her words slip sharp from her mouth like shards of glass, and he's almost surprised neither of them are bleeding, standing so close in the little room.

He swallows hard, looks from the scar to her eyes, and she doesn't move.

"Surviving isn't the same as living," he says eventually, and her eyes close briefly.

"I'm doing the best that I can," she says, and her voice breaks, and so does his anger.

"You don't have to do this alone," he says, and steps closer to her, places his hands on her shoulders and feels the way they tremble beneath his touch.

"Bellamy," she says, and her own hands brace themselves on his chest.

"We can do this together," he says, trailing one hand from her shoulder to her elbow to her wrist, until he's holding her hands in place over his heart.

When she leans up, presses the gentlest kiss to his cheek, he thinks that the last unbroken part of him will shatter when her lips leave his skin. But the sinking in his gut turns to a giddy surprise when instead of embracing him, instead of walking away, instead of leaving him behind, she traces a line from his cheek to his mouth.

"Together," she whispers, and he doesn't know if he's ever tasted anything as good as that word straight from her lips to his.

So then he kisses her, _really_, finally, kisses Clarke, and when she shivers he uses it as an excuse to pull her closer.

And when she pulls at his clothes with the hands still pressed to his chest, he tugs them off while she undoes her own bra and pants. When they're both bare, they tumble down onto her bedroll, and her lips curve against his.

"It's warm," she whispers.

He will spend the rest of his life on the ground keeping her warm, Bellamy thinks frantically, dragging his lips from her mouth to her throat to her collarbone, because it's only fitting to repay the favor. Because she is _warm_ beneath him, skin heated where it touches his, soft and slick and hot between her legs when he slips a hand between them.

He realizes then that he hasn't been truly warm since that day in the sun, drenched in sweat and and exhaustion and a bone-weary triumph. Since the heat turned to ice on his skin and in his lungs the moment his forgiveness wasn't enough for her.

The smallest fragment of anger blooms again, not enough to stop him from this, to keep him from _her_, but enough that when he enters her, gentleness is the furthest thought from his mind.

Her body arches up into his and her nails, ragged and unkempt, tear at his skin when she scrabbles for a hold on his back; he darts forward and swallows the rest of her wordless hiss with a different kind of kiss than they've shared so far. Clarke doesn't seem to mind the hard pressure of his mouth, because she just turns her head to better breathe while she nips sharply at his lips. Somehow the taste of blood that blossoms between them isn't surprising; it's just the way of the ground, and even if what is happening between them is always bloody and dark, he'll take it, because it's still warm, and it's still alive, and it's still them, together.

It's fast, and rough, and sloppy, and the opposite of anything he'd ever allowed himself to imagine when he thought of Clarke like this, but when has anything between him and Clarke ever gone as planned?

Then her legs wrap tightly around his hips, and she slides one hand up to grasp his hair while the other snakes down to touch herself, and when he snaps his hips harder against hers, she comes apart with a whisper of his name. And Bellamy follows after her, muffling the near-sob of her name in her hair.

He'll always follow Clarke Griffin.

(Who is he trying to kid?

He's been following her from the beginning.)

* * *

Author's Note: I actually meant to mark "The Way of the Ground" as complete when I posted it, but messed it up. But all of your kind reviews, favorites, and follows helped inspire me to write a second part. I hope you enjoyed!


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